USTAD ALI AKBAR KHAN / EMPEROR OF MELODY CD

£8.99

'Alubhai, as I still call him, is one of the great musicians of the world. I always considered him to be the true master of the sarod, and in fact to this day I still feel he is the best. I have heard no one else who has attained such depth of feeling on the instrument. It is apparent in everything: the tone he gets from the sarod, the way his fingers touch the strings, the notes he chooses as he develops the raga, and the way he phrases and bends those notes also. It is a sound, and a quality, that no one can duplicate. After all these years, I still feel that way.' - Ravi Shankar

'Sometimes people ask me, "How should we prepare ourselves to hear this music?", and I always reply, "Don't prepare. Just come and relax. The music will tell you what to do." ' - Ali Akbar Khan

Ali Akbar Khan was one of the greatest musicians of the Indian subcontinent. A man completely absorbed in the music of the classical tradition that he inherited, and that he helped popularise in the west. In 1955, after years of training and performing in India, he made his first trip to the west at the invitation of the famous violinist Yehudi Menuhin. Khan arrived in New York City and performed in a festival of Indian culture at the Museum of Modern Art, that featured the dancer Shanta Rao and the first screening of Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali (at this point billed as The Story of Apu and Durga).

That evening, for the first time, the sound of the sarod was introduced to the American ear. While in New York, Menuhin arranged for Khan and his group of musicians to record the very first long-playing record of Indian music. The music industry in India had not yet embraced the notion that audiences would be prepared to listen to recordings of classical music for more than five or six minutes. But the huge success of Ali Akbar Khan's groundbreaking album, Music Of India: Morning and Evening Ragas, convinced them to revise their thinking and soon afterwards the big record companies began issuing long-playing records of all of India's betterknown classical musicians.

Khan recorded celebrated duets (jugalbandi's) with Ravi Shankar, the Karnatak violinist L Subramaniam, and the sitarist Vilayat Khan, and involved himself in intriguing collaborations with such western musicians as the classical guitarist Julian Bream. In 1971, he and Ravi Shankar and such western musicians as Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton, participated in the concert for Bangladesh at Madison Square Garden, New York, that had been organised by George Harrison to benefit refugees of Cyclone Bhola and the Bangladesh Liberation War.

Khan scored many films, among them Satyajit Ray's Devi (The Goddess 1960) and the first Merchant Ivory feature, The Householder (1963). A film about Khan and the musical and cultural responsibilities inherited by his son, Alam, will soon be released. Joshua Dylan Mellars’ Play Like a Lion: The Legacy of Maestro Ali Akbar Khan

This edition combines the two historic, much sought-after, long-players recorded by Khan in India in 1960 and 1961